Dear mIRC User, It is with great joy that I announce a new mIRC version. mIRC's new version 5.81 released thursday, november 9th, 2000. You get this message because you have subscribed to the mIRC Release mailing list. Among over six hundred thousand other subscribers you're the first to hear about this release! The new mIRC is available from http://www.mirc.com/ and from all fast mirrors all over the world. We also give a few download addresses below. * How to upgrade? As you know mIRC is distributed in self-extracting cabinets that help you to install mIRC on your PC. Simply download the cabinet of your choice and run the installer. Follow the instructions the installer program gives to you. When upgrading all your old settings and scripts will stay as they were, if you want that. Read the questions the installer program asks with care and nothing can go wrong. You will be chatting with the new mIRC in no time. If you get stuck or if you want to find out more about a certain feature, just click on a Help button or browse the Help file and you should find lots of hints to help you out. * Where to download? For the latest download addresses just go to the mIRC website. As a special service to you we included some links below where mIRC is available already; - 32 bit mIRC, for Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME and NT. (mirc581t.exe) California http://home.vpi.net/~hawk/mirc581t.exe Kuwait http://mirc.kems.net/mirc581t.exe Dalnet ftp://ftp.dal.net/dalnet/clients/mirc/mirc581t.exe UK http://users.powernet.co.uk/graye/mirc/mirc581t.exe Texas ftp://disc.cba.uh.edu/mIRC/mirc581t.exe Florida http://members.shai-net.com/mirc/mirc581t.exe - 16 bit mIRC, for Windows 3.x. (mirc581s.exe) California http://home.vpi.net/~hawk/mirc581s.exe Kuwait http://mirc.kems.net/mirc581s.exe Dalnet ftp://ftp.dal.net/dalnet/clients/mirc/mirc581s.exe UK http://users.powernet.co.uk/graye/mirc/mirc581s.exe Texas ftp://disc.cba.uh.edu/mIRC/mirc581s.exe Florida http://members.shai-net.com/mirc/mirc581s.exe On the mIRC websites also the new mIRC FAQ version 45 (mfaq45hp.zip) is available. The FAQ answers a lot of questions regarding mIRC, IRC, DCC and the like. It also includes a tutorial on Aliases, Popups and on 'programming' the Tools/Remote section... As you know mIRC is shareware. It can be downloaded freely and evaluated for 30 days. Assuming you find that you enjoy using mIRC, it would be great if you registered your copy. Your one time registration fee licenses you to use your copy of mIRC and helps to support our continued work on mIRC. * Improvements and new features: This version has far too many improvements, new features and functions to mention here in detail. I'll point to some of the simple ones here - the ones you might encounter right away; - Remember how mIRC now uses it's own internal beep sound for event beeps? By popular request the internal beep is now only played for event beeps. mIRC uses the default windows sound for errors etc. and a "pc speaker" option has been added overriding both of them. Happy? - Another looong awaited feature is a built-in uninstaller. I wouldn't know why that is needed but next time you clean up your PC, mIRC is easily removed by the control panel add/remove dialog! It also removes all registry changes btw. - An important change has been made to the socket connection routines. mIRC was binding the connect socket, even if it wasn't necessary. This may have prevented mIRC from connecting through a DSL or network environment. - The Flood protection has been improved by sending a NOTICE instead of a PRIVMSG to the server every now and then. As you might know mIRC will wait for this notice to get back from the server before it resumes sending any queued lines. - A small problem with the .chat files that unloaded all of your remotes has been fixed. More important is the complete integration of .chat file support into the mIRC executable. The mlink helper applications are no longer needed! mIRC will also set up the .cha and .chat associations in the registry. - With mIRC 5.81 we're experimenting with support for URL's of the irc://irc.undernet.org:6667/mIRC format. This makes it very easy to add a link to your website leading to your favorite IRC channel! Give it a try? Please note however that this only seems to be working for MS Internet Exploder -not Netscape- we're still working on this :) See http://www.mirc.com/mirclink.html for up-to-date info. - The new /anick command no longer changes your current nickname, unless the alternate nick is the active one. /nick will try to prevent nick and altnick from becoming identical nicks. - By popular request you can now either disable, or ignore all except certain known file types, or ignore only certain known (and often malicious) file types in the DCC Ignore feature. * Buggies fixed: mIRC's new version fixes most, if not all, of the small but nevertheless annoying buggies found in the previous version 5.8. Some prominent ones are: - A small change in the Channel Central (use the /channel command) blocked the use of control characters in the topic editbox. This blocked the use of colours etc. Sorry. - The /splay command will now accept long file names even if they're not enclosed in quotes and error messages are now also wrapped. - A little bug that emerged if you double-clicked URL's under Windows ME is fixed. - Another buggy in the Agent wasn't allowing you to turn agent on/off on a per channel/query window basis. * Scripters: All you mIRC scripters will love this version for its load of new features. You know by now that you have to dig through the help file and versions.txt to get hold of the best among them. Some things you might miss there are the old /closemsg command since the /close handles closing query windows a-ok. Also gone from the documents are the $sdir, $file, $hfile, and $dir identifiers that are still supported but are no longer documented in the help file. Please remove their use from your scripts and use their new alternatives! In the future mIRC will no longer support them. I'm sure you will have a lot of fun! Apart from removing thingies, about hundred other features, variables and identifiers are improved or added. Have fun exploring them! Please read the details of all changes in the versions.txt distributed with mIRC and available on the Web. Good luck and have fun with this new mIRC! Tjerk Vonck. __________________________________________________________________ * What is this and how can you unsubscribe from this mailing list? This mIRC Release mailing list is a low volume, low frequency announcement list. Typically you will get one message right after each mIRC release, only a few times a year. The last time was 2 months ago, in September. The list is not a discussion list, there will be only one poster - me, the listmaster of mIRC Co. Ltd. We will not use or abuse this list for other messages. It is very easy to get removed from this list. Just use the unsubscribe form found on the Mailing Lists page on the mIRC website http://www.mirc.com/mailing.html
